TServo2049

Space Kaijuu said:

Sunbow is now owned by TV Loonland, so Sony would probably have to license the title from them.

Actually, no. TV Loonland no longer owns the Sunbow catalog - it's now in the hands of Hasbro themselves.

I'm surprised that Sony still controls the film in the States - they have no rights to anything else in the Sunbow catalog anymore.

Don't get too excited about this old transfer.

A lot of 80s/early 90s transfers looked very "neutralized", probably in order to read better on CRTs - for example, in early transfers of Empire, Hoth looked very white (more white than any extant print sources we've seen), and Yoda (and Dagobah in general) looked almost gray.

I'm wondering if this transfer also had a yellow boost so that the image would "read" better - the Carolco logo looks almost sepia-tone.

Not trying to pooh-pooh it - just saying that the Siskel and Ebert clips, which were during the theatrical release and thus clearly not timed for home video, have a much more pronounced blue cast in the night shots than that old DVD (possibly originally LD) transfer.

The distinctive blue look in Cameron's films was never "natural", it was always added or pumped up in the lab. As we've pointed out, if you watch the trailers for T2, you can see a lot of scenes with their original colors, as filmed. (Examples: Arnold and John on the motorcycle, the hospital chase, the Cyberdyne shootout.)

I thought Aliens was scanned from the original negatives, meaning that the color timing, which was done at an intermediate stage, did not exist in the scan and had to be done over from scratch. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

But just because the "blue" color timing was done at a later stage doesn't make it any less legitimate - those were Cameron's original color choices, and him altering them is IMO just as bad as Vittorio Storaro's insistence on cropping his own Panavision compositions to his now-preferred 2:1 ratio. We still can't get The Last Emperor in its original AR just because its cinematographer has gone insane...but I digress.

Point is, I think the industry has almost become too deferential to the wishes of the filmmaker, in the here and now, rather than what they put down on film then. Lucas with Star Wars, Cimino with Heaven's Gate, Coppola with Apocalypse Now (thank goodness he eventually relented, and also that Storaro's reframing decision was finally overruled)...I shudder to think what might have happened if Ridley Scott had insisted that the Final Cut of Blade Runner be the only available version...

That's not to say the studios can't make awful decisions on their own (because they certainly do), but I wonder whether, if the filmmakers weren't involved, some of these films might have had releases which looked more authentic to the theatrical presentations...

captainsolo said:

I just happened across the original CAV disc of TLM and the CLV of The Lion King, and while no major Disney fan and certainly not at all as knowledgeable as those in this thread on the topic they blew me away.

Despite being cropped to a 1.33 frame, I had just seen my sister's BD of TLM and in even the LD's opening shots was awestruck at the amount of atmospheric fog that simply wasn't there in the BD. Fine detail was inherent on this disc from 1990 that felt far more natural than anything the BD could muster. I even tried the BD on my CRT screen and that did next to nothing.

I just got out of a "sing-along" screening of TLM - I went solely because the theater website said it would be 35mm. Sure enough, it was - a 1997 print with literally burned-in lyrics.

As I do now with all 35mm screenings I go to, I was studying the image throughout. And right at the beginning, I saw the heavy diffusion in the opening scene. (Eric spotting "Vanessa" om the beach had the fog too - as well as a distinctly brownish cast.)

Lighting effects were blown out (in a very filmic way, not a clipped-whites way), the sunset wedding scene had the characters darkened by the backlit skies just like I remember from the pre-2006 video releases, and the animation lines did look thin (depending on how close the camera was to the artwork, at least), but in a very organic way - they flickered and fluctuated, they didn't look clean and consistent like Disney seems to want their 2D stuff to look now.

And of course, it had GRAIN, that magic ingredient which makes 2D animation look like a FILM instead of a glorified Flash cartoon...

I'd love to see a 1989 print (even though AFAIK the 1997 restoration was strictly photochemical). Did Derann make any Super 8 feature prints?

I looked at the Siskel and Ebert review, which was during the theatrical release, and the hospital chase, the T-1000 entering the helicopter, and a couple other scenes that weren't blue in the trailers are blue there. And the "You can't just go around killing people" scene also has the blue tint. (Yes, it looks purple, but that's due to incorrect hue setting at some stage between the film-to-tape transfer of the footage and the digital file on that site - either in the telecine, video post, the VHS recording or the VHS-to-digital rip.)

Those blues seem in line with Cameron's sensibilities - I can't believe that Cameron would sign off on a non-blue color timing, it would go out to theaters that way, and then he would change his mind and extra money would have been spent to completely retime the film just for home video a few months later. I would understand if the blue timing had been introduced in the Special Edition extended cut, but no, it's there in every home release of the theatrical cut too.

I think the most logical explanation is that the final color timing hadn't been done when assembling the trailers, and that the blue is consistent with what showed up in theaters in 1991.

Re: The in-theater clip, yes I know it's recorded off a screen, but I would guess that in a theater, it would look in line with other late 80s/early 90s release prints. Here are trends I've been seeing as I attend repertory screenings (for example, I took a lot of mental notes from the original 1987 print of Lethal Weapon I saw a couple weeks ago).

-Slight "LPP yellow" cast to the lighter end of the color spectrum, especially whites and highlights (but whites still look bright)

-Teal and blue are two separate colors. Even with the "LPP yellow" effect, light blues only look slightly teal, sometimes, but blues (blue skies, blue jeans, night shots) still actually look blue.

-While lighter greens look yellowish ("LPP yellow" again?), deeper greens don't.

-Less pink in skin tones than in old video transfers, less orange than in modern transfers; unless they're particularly ruddy, white people tend to have a complexion similar to what Crayola used to call "flesh", while blacks look chocolate and/or bronze (both also owing to the "yellowness" of LPP?)

-General lack of red in objects and elements that are not specifically red; blood is red, fire engines are red, stop lights are red, but stuff like fire tends to be more yellow-orange than red-orange.

Any of this sound familiar to any of you who have seen prints of T1, T2, or any other films from that timespan? Just curious.

In general, from what little I've seen in the way of 35mm prints, I don't think there have been very many home transfers that do justice to 80s/90s photochemical timing. Old transfers had too much red/pink, modern transfers often have too much teal and orange, and it's seeming to me that original theatrical prints actually fell somewhere in the middle.

I look forward to seeing what you guys can do.

Here's some in-theater footage from a 35mm screening back in May.

Supposedly it's an original print from 1991. Not sure why it's in a can that previously belonged to a print of RoboCop 3, or why the bands with all the print info on them carry the logo of Fine Line Features, but still - just look at that color.

I didn't say I thought his face would have been completely hidden in darkness, I said ALMOST. Like, you can vaguely see his face, but only vaguely.

I wish I could see an original 35mm to confirm my suspicion...

Very interesting stuff. And I'm glad to hear that the print was in very good condition. I've seen a couple repertory prints that have been quite beat up, especially at reel changes (presumably due to the reels having been plattered and de-plattered multiple times?)

And as to how dark the first Batman was, I have a theory. It had to have been dark enough that the Joker reveal actually worked. In every video transfer of the film, when he's standing in the shadows talking to Grissom, you can make out his face (to differing degrees depending on which transfer). But I just can't believe that Burton would have intended this; the original prints had to have had blacks sufficiently deep so as to almost completely hide him in darkness until he steps out into the light and says "You can call me...JOKER!"

(I have the same belief about Beauty and the Beast - there is no way in hell we were meant to be able to make out anything but a vague shape of the Beast recoiling into the shadows in the prologue. The West Wing scenes had to have had deeper shadows than any of the modern transfers - even in the brightened VHS/LD master, you couldn't make out his features very well, and I want to believe that was the intent.)

monks, what SilverWook is referring to is that workprints to quite a few of the Renaissance-era features were leaked into the VHS trading market in the 90s. Some of them have been ripped and shared in the past (late 00s/early 10s), but the torrents and links are all dead/deleted/expired now.

Now the only way to obtain them seems to be through trading. Perhaps someone can rectify that...

Not sure how many there are. Some of them used to be on the Spleen, but they were taken down, presumably because of their general rule of "no Disney." I have the Great Mouse Detective one, but never got any of the others.

I know that TLM, Aladdin, TLK and Pocahontas all showed up in "Mr. Whorse's Workprint Film Collection" - the Rapidshare links still show up on FileKnow, but unfortunately they're all long dead. :(

Me three. I would KILL to see a scan of an original-release print of BATB, with the original photochemical timing intact. The modern releases are too bright and too saturated - even though the old VHS/LD transfers were adjusted to read on CRT displays, they still show that originally, it looked much more "filmic" than it does now.

No. I'm sure it's better than the U.S. version though.

The Derann clip on Vimeo is just an excerpt of a digest - maybe I should contact the guy who posted it.

The U.S. transfer is not just too dark, it also has black crush, and the grading has a lot of that blue/orange dichotomy. For example, take the Ivory Tower scene; if the Derann digest clip I found on Vimeo is any indication, it did have a golden "dusk" look to it in the original timing, but on the U.S. BD, those hues seem to have been digitally pushed to the point where color detail that's not gold or orange or amber or brown is drowned out.

Here's another example. The climax from the DVD - start at 1:22. (Forgive the lower quality, it's all I could find, and the gamma seems to be too high - though that just may be the standard higher-gamma/lower-contrast look used from the 80s up until the decline of CRTs)

Same scene, U.S. Blu transfer.

Look in the background whenever the lightning flashes. In the DVD clip, you can see color details like the brown wood of the shelves. In the Blu-ray, everything is shades of blue. Missing color information of this sort may well not be recoverable, even with YouToo's methods.

I am assuming they are using the Dutch release as the source for all footage seen in the International cut. They would just be using the German cut transfer for the scenes that exclusively show up in the German cut - in which case fake grain unfortunately seems necessary, so that the DNR'ed German footage blends in with the grain-intact Dutch footage.

Which reminds me, have you given any thought to how you will be handling the shots which run longer in the German cut? I think those comprise most of the additional footage. Will you just switch to the German cut for those entire shots, or can you figure out a way to blend the two sources together?

ww12345: There is no other feature film called Melody Time, and certainly not one from 1948. And Roy Rogers and Trigger do appear in the film - remember the live-action intro to the Pecos Bill segment? (Not to mention that Roy Rogers narrates the segment, and performs the song...)

Would be interesting to see an IB print, even if we already have access to the uncut Pecos Bill on the R2 DVD.

There were 35mm prints of the extended editions of FOTR and TTT - I believe there were marathon screenings when ROTK came out. However, from what I've read, ROTK never had a 35mm EE release.

I think we have as much chance of finding the FOTR/TTT:EE discs as we do of actually finding 35mm prints of them. :)

I wonder if the theatrical DTS discs for the Lord of the Rings trilogy are out there somewhere. I'm surprised nobody has ever even mentioned LOTR in this thread...

Hello,

With the release of The Desolation of Smaug, I’m back to thinking about Middle-Earth. While I love the LOTR films just as they are, I am intrigued by the idea of fan edits that try to hew closer to the source material. So I’ve been trying to obtain the two major edits - Sharkey’s “Purist” cuts, and kerr’s “Red Book of Westmarch” edits.

Unfortunately, kerr’s Books IV-VI don’t have torrents, and the Rapidshare links on tehParadox have long since expired. (Also, the public torrent for Book I doesn’t have any seeders, only a bunch of peers who all have the same 98.7%, so my copy of Book I is incomplete - it’s only missing 9 pieces, but it’s still incomplete.)

I wonder, does anybody out there still have Books IV-VI, and possibly a complete file of Book I? I would really, really appreciate it. Thanks.

Good luck with that.

I wonder if the English credits on the Japanese BD were done in 1984 in anticipation for the English release (then changed when the film was re-edited), or if they are just a digital facsimile.

monks19 said:

TServo2049, is this historian/private collector reachable ?

http://www.3dfilmarchive.com

Bob Furmanek is someone who works in Hollywood, like Mike Verta (e.g., he's the guy who found the color negative of The Cage). I have no idea if he actually owns the print, he just posted that frame scan on a forum discussion about color timing.

And as to RKO titles, I think it's pointless to create speculative recreations of them. I would only be on board for recreating them if someone had access to a print with the original titles, or at least frame grabs from such a print.

There is at least one original IB print of Snow White in private collector hands - film historian Bob Furmanek posted a screenshot of it on another forum:

http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u235/BobFurmanek/31383_1476325630885_4698463_n_zpsb2ddfb9f.jpg

Yes, that's right, the Japanese LD was the only widescreen one. I-III got widescreen LDs in North America in the 90s, but not IV.

While this doesn't have anything to do with any recommended editions, I just realized something: If you watch Gremlins, you can actually get a very good glimpse of what Snow White's color timing looked like prior to the 1987 and 1993 restorations.

The old, warm, sepia-brownish look is clearly evident in the excerpts seen in that film, and they may actually be the highest-quality source out there (until someone obtains a print that's not faded)...

See you next year, DJ! The Neverending Story Dutch Blu-ray is still in transit from the Netherlands - I got an e-mail back on the 9th that it had shipped, but it hasn't arrived yet. (Not worried, overseas deliveries tend to take quite a while anyways...)